F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby and the Imagination of Wonder

Abstract

formulate an interpretation of a book which attempts explain why we keep coming back it, suspend usual critical apparatus and simply try concentrate on those details, selective as they may sometimes be, which shape or determine way a particular book reads us as well as we read it. I regard this, in fact, as an indispensable part of critic's total job of work. For criticism does nor end with explication, it only begins there. It ends, if at all, only with an account of how specific books, writers or traditions somehow reorder mental, emotional and spiritual furniture of our lives, somehow move us, if ever so slightly, accept new ideas of order, fresh reconceptions of what will suffice. In this, one of its furthest reaches, act of criticism is very like act of love: The critic finds himself in paradoxical situation of seeking preserve and enhance memory of something he cherishes only discover in process that this response has been compelled almost from very beginning by an odd sense that he is merely reciprocating in kind. Hence, as much as critic should strive, in Matthew Arnold's words, to see object as in itself it really is, there comes a point in his negotiations with certain literary texts when his comprehension inevitably will, and necessarily should, be determined as well by how object sees him.' Though few may wish go quite as far as Leslie Fiedler, there is still a certain warrant his confession that the truth one tries tell about literature is finally [no] different from truth one tries tell about indignities and rewards of being kind of man one is-an American, let's say, in second half of twentieth century, learning read his country's books.2 What Fiedler is suggesting has been beauti-